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Would you let a self-driving car take your children to school?
Although we might see a huge improvement in the following years, it still makes us feel uncomfortable to let a car drive itself, and for sure it will be like that for quite some time.
Monday morning. My alarm clock rings at 7.00 am to wake me up and a new day starts after a busy weekend. It is freezing outside, the streets are covered with a soft white blanket as it has been snowing all night long.
Once I get downstairs I shout to my kids to get ready for school. Like every morning the car will pick them up at 7.45 am and, as usual, I might have to pay the delay fee again.
They run down the stairs, pick up their breakfast to go and get outside. The white vehicle opens its doors and as soon as they get into the car, it goes down the white street smoothly. There isn’t any driver and although I’ve been using this service for several years now, I still don’t get used to it.
I’m still from the times when we drove cars ourselves.
Not so far away in time
Since the Google car broke the news a few years ago, self-driving technology has taken the leap forward and lots of interesting things have happened.
But, still today, some people have doubts that we will ever manage to solve autonomy for it to be fully reliable and safe. It’s not that companies involved are not going forward, but with every step that we think we get closer, we face new problems and challenges.
Today, our main issues are still technical but as these get resolved, we will face new challenges in the moral and legal spaces that will delay its use greatly, will create a new debate, and will need to get solved by the society as a whole.
Lidar is dead, long life to cameras
When this started, it was all about sensors. The more data the system could gather from the environment, the more information would be available to make decisions. It was a time when these decisions were made in real-time with the computer power available.
